On Monday, Dec. 15, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the 56 individual artists, duos, and collectives selected for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. Among those participating in the upcoming 82nd edition is CalArts alum Mariah Garnett (Film/Video MFA 11).
Scheduled to open on March 8, the 2026 Whitney Biennial will explore forms of relationality, including familial ties, shared mythologies, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, and alternative infrastructures of care and collaboration.
Garnett will present work from her recently completed project centered on the archive of her great-great-aunt Ruth Lynda Deyo, a composer and spiritualist who lived in Egypt from 1924 until her death in 1960. While in Cairo, Deyo transcribed spirit communications and composed an ambitious but unrealized opera about Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.
One component of Garnett’s body of work is Songbook, a 55-minute video piece documenting her collaboration with opera singers, experimental musicians, and a Jordanian playwright to develop a new libretto set to Deyo’s original music. Moving away from the colonial frameworks that shaped Deyo’s original project, Garnett’s work foregrounds artistic collaboration, creative obsession, the spirit world, and forms of chosen family sustained at the margins.
A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video, Garnett lives and works in Los Angeles. Her recent exhibitions were held at the Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Also included in the biennial is Jonathan González, a choreographer, scholar and recipient of the 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.
